in either case, is a little patience and a little common sense.  Browning might say, as his wife said in an early preface, “I never mistook pleasure for the final cause of poetry, nor leisure for the hour of the poet;” as indeed he has himself said, to much the same effect, in a letter printed many years ago:  “I never pretended to offer such literature as should be a substitute for a cigar or a game at dominoes to an idle man.”  But he has not made anything like such a demand on the reader’s faculties as people, not readers, seem to suppose. Sordello is difficult, Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau is difficult, so, perhaps, in parts, is Fifine at the Fair; so, too, on account of its unfamiliar allusions, is Aristophanes’ Apology; and a few smaller poems, here and there, remotely argumentative or specially complex in psychology, are difficult.  But really these are about all to which such a term as “unintelligible,” so freely and recklessly flung about, could with the faintest show of reason be applied by any reasonable being.  In the 21,116 lines which form Browning’s longest work and masterpiece, the “psychological epic” of The Ring and the Book, I am inclined to think it possible that a careful scrutiny might reveal 116 which an ordinary reader would require to read twice.  Anything more clear than the work as a whole it would be difficult to find.  It is much easier to follow than Paradise Lost; the Agamemnon is rather less easy to follow than A Blot in the ’Scutcheon.

That there is some excuse for the accusation, no one would or could deny.  But it is only the excuse of a misconception.  Browning is a thinker of extraordinary depth and subtlety; his themes are seldom superficial, often very remote, and his thought is, moreover, as swift as it is subtle.  To a dull reader there is little difference between cloudy and fiery thought; the one is as much too bright for him as the other is too dense.  Of all thinkers in poetry, Browning is the most swift and fiery.  “If there is any great quality,” says Mr. Swinburne, in those noble pages in which he has so generously and triumphantly vindicated his brother-poet from this very charge of obscurity—­

“If there is any great quality more perceptible than another in Mr. Browning’s intellect, it is his decisive and incisive faculty of thought, his sureness and intensity of perception, his rapid and trenchant resolution of aim.  To charge him with obscurity is about as accurate as to call Lynceus purblind, or complain of the sluggish action of the telegraphic wire.  He is something too much the reverse of obscure; he is too brilliant and subtle for the ready reader of a ready writer to follow with any certainty the track of an intelligence which moves with such incessant rapidity, or even to realise with what spider-like swiftness and sagacity his building spirit leaps and lightens to and fro and backward and forward, as it lives along the animated line